LA PETITE SOULAN

Century-old oaks surround the vacation home, full of architectural and decorative intimacy. The house is bright, swept by west winds that smell like the ocean. We wanted a place that reminds of travel and serves as a refuge for nomads. A house made for freedom and ease.

The architect designed the extension from the existing building. He took over the entire house and rejuvenated the old building by giving priority to the perspectives and views. He kept the 18th century bricks made of a paste as fine and smooth as that of the tiles. The building will soon be two hundred years old and visitors should feel it.

Our house is an ideal setting for family life, a place where vacations are lived within nature. And this is its strength, the vast living room opening onto the terrace that the architect used to frame the view on the meadow. The wooded floor allows you to walk barefoot throughout the outside area. The children are wallowing on the Balinese bed waiting for the heat to retreat. In the winter sun, one can also take a nap there, sheltered from the wind that runs from the Atlantic.

The old and the new seem to work together in perfect symbiosis: one can no longer exist without the other. The entrance, living room, dining room and kitchen have been organized in an open space around a five-meter long kitchen island. Light, transparency and volume are everywhere.

The objects are from our stays in Asia, America, Europe; the Indian ottomans of Jodhpur, the Burmese offering bowl, the Lanna calligraphy, the wedding couple from Java, the part of a door-mantle from Rajasthan, the gigantic Japanese kanji, some Navajo potteries or the old candleholders from New England…
 

The objects of our geographical peregrinations are there, the Indian footstools of Jodhpur, the Burmese offering bowl, the Lanna calligraphy, the javanese wedding coupe, the part of the mantle of a door from Rajasthan...